JEREMY KING: “Let them take your money but never your soul”

[gentle music] When I was about 14, I started to call you both by your first name, and I realized I was pushing you away because there was an alienation there.

And I've come to realize that there are any number of people whose name I know, who's acquaintances or even friends, but there's only two people I can call Mom and Dad or...

So I'd like to reinstate that.

And I was, I don't know what I was, 40 or so, and I said, "Uh, how do you feel about that?" My father was in tears, and he said, "You know, I love that.

It means so much to me." I turned to my mother and I said, "Molly, what about you?" And she said, "No, I've been Molly all this time.

I think I'll remain that way." Felt a little bit like a criminal, everything being stripped from me, my phone, my laptop, e- everything taken, and basically cast out onto the street.

Well, basically you were-

Yeah

... cast out.

You were asked to leave and-

I was told to get out, uh, and I had no way of communicating with anybody, and I'm thinking, "So can I remember anybody's phone number? Can I borrow a phone from somebody?" I was bored, thinking, "How can I make this more interesting?" And suddenly remembered the dice, and I would just do simple things with decisions on where to go for a drink or where to eat or...

But I started to make decisions about my time in the office.

12 different options, which mostly are about you go up, you go up and change your course, you go up a year late, you go up...

You're all pretty safe.

But the danger had to be something dangerous, so I put in a really unlikely one, which was if you throw a double six, if you then get a managership at this place or similar within a month of your 21st birthday, you stay at hospitality for the rest of your life.

And I turned down university placed.

Have I regretted that? I think it's only now once a week I regret it.

It's really, really, it's been a bane of my life.

Welcome to Crisis, What Crisis!? If you're listening to this and facing a challenge you're not quite sure how to tackle, then this podcast is for you.

It exists for one simple reason, to help you through.

I'm Andy Coulson, and before we get started, please do follow and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Now, I want to start this episode, a bit unusually, with a thank you to our guest, the legendary restaurateur Jeremy King.

When I think back over the 35 years or so that I've spent eating in his restaurants, he's been present at so many important moments in my life without ever really knowing it.

When I've been celebrating professional successes in my days as a journalist, uh, an editor, birthdays, anniversaries, my son's christening.

And when I came out of prison, a group of friends organized a lunch for me at the Beaumont Hotel and, uh, and put a, a metal file in the cake, which I'm told was hilarious.

And when I walked back into the Delawny Restaurant for the first time on the other side of my dramas, I was handed a glass of champagne with the words, "Welcome back." And I can't tell you how much that meant.

And that is the thing about Jeremy's restaurants.

They are where life happens, all of life.

So before anything else, my thanks to him for all of that, and also for joining me today, of course.

Across 45 years, Jeremy has built and re- rebuilt some of the most loved restaurants that London has ever had.

La Caprice, The Ivy, J. Sheekey, The Wolseley.

At one point, the highest grossing restaurant in Britain, and The Delawny.

Restaurants that drew anyone who was anyone from Princess Diana to Mick Jagger, while still being somewhere any guest was made to feel like the most important person in the room.

In 2014, he was awarded an OBE for his services to hospitality.

But Jeremy's is a story also told in gambles, of risks and rebuilding from nothing not once, but twice.

Most brutally in 2022 when he lost the company that carried his name and was thrown out of the doors of the restaurant he built quite literally.

And yet here he is at 72 doing it all again.

The Arlington, formerly La Caprice, The Park, and 26 years after he first attempted to buy it, Simpsons on the Strand.

He's also written a remarkable book, Without Reservation: Lessons from a Life in Restaurants.

Billed as a memoir, but anyone who reads it will quickly realize it's something closer to an operating manual full of lessons from a life in restaurants and business that are transferable for us all.

And that's where we will take today's conversation.